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What happened to the 5570 bars on the chart? As of 12/23/08 they disappeared (I remember seeing them in the original article when I viewed it.) Did anandtech get slapped under some non-disclosure of some kind? Shouldn't the article be updated or the graph yanked altogether??? Reply

In one way, for some business situation, cost doesn't matter. But, this doesn't mean it should be wholly ignored. SO, given Intel tendencies to overprice, can we get a pretty, shiny graph of SAPS/dollar? Reply

Although i do not know much about SAP benchmarks, i tend to agree with you. In 15 years working in IT, i have yet to see a speed bump on this kind. 119% is a lot of improvement. 20% was very nice already, 119% it is just too good to be true.

Several were announced in several fields, The Willamette Core was supposed to be a big bang, and advertised as it. And others of course.
Anyway, the same results could be achieved with a web server. You just need to know how to tinker.

But 119% ? The dice must be rigged anywhere in pipe. Even if they cherry picked what test they did. Reply

I think that the Core architechture stars to shine with the add of the Memory controller on die. Having memory controller outside gives you flexibility in the mainboard/chipset selection, but you pay this with latency. Now the improvements in the Nehalem (wider execution units, HT, blah blah blah) plus the Ondie memory controller gives the CPU all the bandwidth neccesary to has the CPU very busy crunching integers.

It was well documented that adding the memory controller on die to any cpu boost the performance, so i think that this record was expected by intel engineers...but not with this huge margin. Reply

Tell that to the guy who won the $207 million lotto this past weekend....

Not surprising really. Wolfdale dual-cores were always competitive against quad-core Phenoms... Now you have removed the one thing keeping Core processors from scaling as well as K10... ie the FSB.. Especially in a highly threaded application, as the writer mentions.. Shows how data starved Penryn really was! Reply

to good to be thrue??? no, just obvious that HT is working fine on this SAP benchmark, count 70-80% off when you shut it down. Weather or not if that is required in real life SAP environments is yet to be shown. Reply

Good point, I updated the blog post. Well, when I see a +100% boost over the previous generation we have to be prudent.

I don't think 70% is a result of HT. Doubling the cores gives you a 70% increase, and there is no way that HT can be as good as doubling the cores. I expect 40% to be more realistic. Still, it is incredible how a dual machine is capable of defeating a quad server which is only a few months older. Reply

The numbers are certainly high, but I think it could be possible. Compared to Dual Opteron 8384, the new Xeon is about 67% faster clock-for-clock based on this benchmark, which isn't too out of whack considering all the changes made to eliminate the various system bottlenecks and HT, since Intel CPU itself (by that I mean capabilities of the CPU only, such as its wider execution core, etc) has always been more powerful than the AMD counterpart.

If this is indeed true, though, it'd mean that Intel will wipe out AMD from their coveted 4 and 8 socket server market even with the new Opteron based on K10.5 architecture. Very scary... Reply

I have been a hardware journalist for 10 years now, and I never seen this. A new CPU + platform doubles the performance over a previous one without: 1) Using new instructions 2) a newer process technology 3) large jump in clockspeed or 4) running a very exotic benchmark that stresses only a very small part of the CPU. Reply

Sufficient bandwidth of the POWER6 results very good scaling with SMT not only in SAP but Spec tests as well. Nehalem's increased bandwidth could be a reason for the good scaling with SMT in this case. Reply

My guess would be that they screwed up the number of cores (dual = quad)... That would bring it down to expected gains and figures...

Altough if the performance is indeed correct... The i7 based serverchips will be the fastest cpu's in the servermarket for a very long time... And that might be a very bad thing for AMD and the microprocs industry in general.
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